


You Burn With The Brightest Flame

by UniverseOnHerShoulders



Series: Prompt Fills [62]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen, Loss, Mentioned Past Companions (Doctor Who)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-03
Updated: 2020-10-03
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:00:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26342260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UniverseOnHerShoulders/pseuds/UniverseOnHerShoulders
Summary: Exploring the TARDIS one day, Yaz stumbles upon the Doctor's bedroom... and a wall of photographs of strangers. Asking the Time Lady about them, she finds a tale unfolding that fills her with anxiety...
Relationships: Thirteenth Doctor & Yasmin Khan
Series: Prompt Fills [62]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/585397
Comments: 5
Kudos: 33





	You Burn With The Brightest Flame

**Author's Note:**

> From the prompt:
> 
> _Yaz discovers The Doctor's room; there are pictures of past companions on the walls and she asks The Doctor about them._

Yaz isn’t _trying_ to snoop; not really. She’s wandering around the TARDIS, as she’s prone to doing sometimes in the evenings and at weekends and in idle moments, and if she happens to uncover anything illuminating then it’s not really _snooping_ , per se; it’s more embarking on a voyage of discovery, or exploring, or… well, she doesn’t know, but she’s sure there’s a good word for it. She’s definitely not looking for trouble; not after her run-in with the strangling plant in the seventh greenhouse from the left or the biting ticket machines in karaoke bus nine; but her heart is in her mouth as she pushes open the nondescript looking door at the end of corridor eighty-nine. In her experience, the least interesting-looking places are often the most dangerous, and so she sidles through the now-open doorway with considerable trepidation, her hands balled into fists at her side just in case of… emergency. Or something.

She isn’t sure what she’d been expecting; perhaps a cinema room, or another anti-grav room; or another garage stocked with fantastical vehicles. What she hadn’t expected is this; a bedroom, somewhat messy, but still very much underwhelming compared to everything else she’d been silently hoping for. She looks around with analytical interest nonetheless; the navy-blue carpet is strewn with odd socks and chocolate wrappers and nuts and bolts; there’s a collection of chipped, mismatched, dirty mugs on the bedside table, and the wardrobe door is ajar, with the sound of something ominous and creaky emitting from within. The bedcovers, which are silver and spangled with embroidered stars, are half-askew, one corner of the duvet hanging perilously close to a half-empty bowl of milk and cereal dregs, and Yaz fights the urge to straighten it, trying to resolve not to touch anything.

There’s a dressing table covered in hairbands and hairgrips in various stages of life – from new and neatly circular hair ties to stretched, worn ones that are losing their elasticity, snapped hairbands, and bent Kirby grips that look entirely useless. There’s a trail of dark-coloured clips that seem to have migrated across the dressing table and into the top drawer, like a trail of ants, and as Yaz looks more closely she sees the corner of a sports bra poking out of the drawer and feels a flash of embarrassment as she understands with awful clarity whose bedroom this is.

Taking several steps back and into the centre of the room, she continues to look around herself with her hands now shoved deeply into her pockets, as though by not touching anything she is lessening the impact of her nosiness. She can’t deny it anymore; this definitely falls into the realm of ‘snooping,’ and yet there’s something oddly fascinating about looking around someone else’s room that she can’t quite resist.

This is where the Doctor lives, she thinks to herself as she looks around at the semi-organised chaos and lets out a long breath. It’s not quite as messy as she’d anticipated; there seems to be a certain kind of logic to the madness, even if that logic is not immediately obvious to Yaz as she stands at the centre of it. There’s several pairs of worn brown boots lined up neatly at the foot of the bed, and the anachronicity of this small detail makes her smile; a tiny bit of tidiness at the heart of a maelstrom of mess.

On one wall, there’s a large, detailed fresco of a planet that’s been haphazardly covered by brightly-coloured posters, and Yaz feels a swooping sense of suspicion that the planet in question is Gallifrey, even as she scans the posters and discovers they seem to mainly centre on Pride events; each is loudly-hued and designed to draw attention from the ochre-hued landscape they conceal. On an adjacent wall is a number of photographs and portraits; there’s a blonde girl who looks about her own age; a black couple with a little boy held up between them; a heavy, marble-type shrine depicting a man in a long coat, the TARDIS, and a woman in flowing Roman robes; a professional-looking photograph of a couple of their wedding day, the woman auburn-haired and the man looking as though he can’t believe his luck; several strips of photobooth pictures, seemingly from the same wedding; two portraits of a dark-haired woman with wide, expressive eyes; a large framed photograph of a woman with a mass of curly blonde hair; and then a photograph of two women that seems to be a selfie – the taller black woman has her arm around her smaller, blonde companion, whilst behind them stars glimmer.

“You found my wall then,” a voice says quietly behind her, and Yaz jumps, turning on the spot and taking in the sight of the Doctor, who is stood in the doorway with her hands in her pockets, surveying her with an unreadable expression. Yaz feels an immediate, crashing sense of guilt, but there’s nowhere to hide, and it’s too late to even try now; she’s been caught in the act.

“I’m… I… I’m sorry… I wasn’t trying to… I didn’t…” Yaz mumbles, feeling her face flush, and she drops her gaze miserably to the carpet, hoping that the Doctor won’t be too angry. “I didn’t… I’m sorry…”

“It’s alright,” the Doctor says brightly, entering the room and shoving the top drawer shut before leaning against it and surveying Yaz with curiosity. “I’m guessing you weren’t looking for my bedroom.”

“No.”

“What _were_ you looking for? Because I’ve just added a new waterslide in the swimming pool, so…”

“Dunno,” Yaz admits, continuing to stare down at the carpet. “I didn’t realise it was your… not at first… I was just… looking…”

“It’s alright,” the Doctor says again, but her voice sounds hollow in a way that betrays that this is not alright, and Yaz feels a fresh pang of guilt. “No harm in looking! Curiosity is natural.”

The Doctor crosses the room to stand beside her, and Yaz chances a glance at her. She doesn’t look angry; instead, as she looks up at the wall of pictures, her expression becomes oddly sad.

“Urm,” Yaz begins uncertainly, unsure whether she’s earnt the right to ask the question. “Who…”

“Some of my friends,” the Doctor says in a subdued tone, gesticulating to it vaguely. “Before you.”

“Oh.” It’s uncomfortably jarring to be reminded that they aren’t the first, even though Yaz knows that she, Ryan and Graham can’t have been the only ones of the Doctor’s friends to travel with her. “What…”

“Oh, it’s a long story.”

“You’ve got a time machine,” Yaz notes, looking up at the wall, shooting the Doctor the kind of cheeky, teasing grin that she knows the Time Lady can’t resist, then noticing that the Doctor is still gazing up at the wall with a haunted look in her eyes. “I mean… you don’t have to… you’re not obligated to tell me… if you don’t want to that’s… sorry, I’m being so…”

“It’s fine,” the Doctor says in a sunny voice, but her eyes are still sad and the levity in her tone belies a current of sadness beneath. “You’re allowed to ask. Shall I start at the beginning? I mean… you know… roughly chronologically speaking? We all know time isn’t linear, but let’s pretend it is. There’s more photos and pictures in my second bedroom, but these are the ones that… well, the most recent.”

She gestures to the blonde girl. “That’s Rose. She looked after me after I survived the Time War, and when I regenerated – changed my face and body, you know. She urm…” the Doctor looks abruptly embarrassed and says very quickly: “She fell in love with me, and I fell in love with her, and to cut a long story short, she ended up stuck in a parallel universe with her family and a different version of me.”

Yaz isn’t sure which part of this story to unpick first; she blinks hard a few times and then chances: “She… parallel… what?”

“There was an… incident. I sort of… regenerated weirdly,” the Doctor sighs impatiently, but she seems more cross at herself than Yaz; more frustrated at her own inability to explain than at Yaz for asking. “It’s hard to explain. I lost my hand just after I regenerated, grew a new one… kept the severed one around… there was a biological meta-crisis and it sort of… grew a new me.”

“Like a worm?”

The Doctor laughs, running a hand through her hair. “Donna said the same,” she says warmly, gesturing to the marble tile. “That’s Donna. She travelled with me - the handsome chap in the coat stood next to her – for a while but things… they got complicated. When this other version of me happened – the meta-crisis one who went to the parallel universe with Rose – it impacted on her, on her mind. I had to wipe her memories to keep her safe, or they would have burned her up like a sun.”

“Right,” Yaz says faintly, feeling vaguely nauseated at the thought of anything similar happening to her. “OK.”

“After Rose but before Donna, there was Martha…” the Doctor points to the photo of the black couple, her expression both proud and guilty. “And Mickey. He was Rose’s boyfriend originally, before I dropped in and sort of… ruined everything. He ended up leaving her… he lived in the parallel universe for a while, but when the meta-crisis version of me got with Rose, he came back to this universe and ended up with Martha. That’s their son, August. Martha was… I wasn’t kind to Martha. I was still struggling over Rose… Martha had a bit of a thing for me-”

“Sensing a theme here.”

“-and I wasn’t perhaps as kind to her as I should’ve been,” the Doctor grimaces, remorse etched across her features. “But she settled down with Mickey; they’re working for Torchwood now. With Jack, you know? It’s his organisation.”

“Flirty Jack?”

“Flirty Jack.”

“Do all your companions fall in love with you? Or just most of them?”

The Doctor snorts, her cheeks turning a distinct shade of pink all the same. “Donna didn’t! Please, she’d have been horrified by that as an accusation. But urm… there was… a fair bit of snogging, yeah.”

“Can’t imagine you snogging anyone.”

“I had different faces… different outfits… I dunno. It was a bit of a trend, for a few years,” the Doctor shakes her head, as though in fond exasperation at her previous selves. “Between Rose and Elizabeth the First…”

“You had a thing with Elizabeth the First?!”

“It’s a long, long story… one for another time,” the Doctor shrugs dismissively, and then indicates the wedding photos. “This is the story for now. That’s Amy and Rory. They got married after a lot of… well, complicated time and space things. Rory got erased from time; I brought him back; he ended up being a plastic Roman centurion for a few thousand years, but we got there in the end. _They_ got there in the end.”

Yaz shoots the Doctor an alarmed sidelong glance.

“Right,” she says with magnanimity, trying to ignore the way her palms have gone clammy at the thought of being turned into a plastic anything. Still, she can hope for a happy ending. “What happened to them?”

“Urm, they had a daughter – more on that in a mo – and then got sent back in time. Lived out their lives in the past quite happily, but I couldn’t visit them. Too much complicated timey-wimey… stuff.”

The Doctor forces a smile, but Yaz can see the pain in her eyes as she stares at the photos; knows how much it would have cost her to stay away.

“What happened to their daughter?” Yaz chances, and the Doctor points to the curly-haired woman.

“That’s her… River. My urm… my wife.”

Yaz feels the air leave the room in an instant; she can only blink at the Doctor in horror for several seconds before she manages to force out the words: “Sorry, your…”

“My wife, yeah. It’s a complicated thing… we keep meeting in the wrong order… she hasn’t seen this body yet; she’s probably going to go mad when she does. Or maybe she has? Honestly, it’s the kind of thing she’d keep to herself… spoilers and all. She’s a Professor of Archaeology. That is… she was. Is. Will be. It’s difficult. Never marry a time traveller, Yaz, it makes for a very complicated love life.”

“Noted,” Yaz says drily, but her heart is pounding. “Don’t you hate archaeologists?”

“No, I point and laugh at them. I have pointed and laughed a lot at River, don’t worry.”

“Can we back it up… you married your best mate’s daughter? Bit weird, innit?”

“It’s… complicated. I didn’t know who she was when I married her. She’s sort of dead now, but she still keeps turning up all the same. I reiterate; never marry a time traveller.”

“Is there any part of your relationships that aren’t complicated?” Yaz demands, jabbing her finger at the two painted portraits. “Who’s she? Is she complicated?”

“Urm,” the Doctor rubs the back of her neck, looking embarrassed for no discernible reason. “Yeah. That’s Clara. She jumped into my personal timestream… scattered herself through my past in millions of echoes of herself. And then she urm… then she… she…”

“What?”

“She died,” the Doctor says in a small voice. “Few years later. Twice, actually.”

“Oh,” Yaz feels a fresh surge of horror and panic. “That’s…”

“Don’t worry!” the Doctor says at once, beaming, although Yaz doesn’t understand why. “She’s fine; she’s alive now. Sort of, anyway. My people brought her back… she can’t die. She’s got her own TARDIS, her own life… she’s doing great.”

“But she’s dead.”

“Only technically.”

“Right,” Yaz says faintly, hardly daring to ask about the final picture. “And those two?”

“That’s Bill and Heather. Bill travelled with me.”

“What happened to her?”

“She got shot through the chest and converted into a Cyberman,” the Doctor says with alarming pragmatism. “Then she died, but Heather – her partner – brought her back and restored her to being human. They’re sort of… undead space lesbians now.”

“Right,” Yaz says in a high, unnatural voice. “Right. Good. Righto. OK. Fab.”

“Yaz,” the Doctor says gently, finally seeming to notice the impact of her words on her friend. “Yaz, you knew when you came with me that this would be dangerous.”

“Yeah but there’s hypothetical danger and there’s your _wall of dead people_.”

“They’re not all dead!”

“Oh, sorry,” Yaz continues, her voice raising an octave as hysteria began to set in. “Your wall of dead, mind-wiped and trapped-in-a-parallel-universe people.”

“Yaz, listen to me,” the Doctor takes her hands and gives them a reassuring squeeze that semi-grounds her, but she can still feel her heart lurching uncomfortably in her chest with each beat it takes. “I made mistakes in my past and because of that, people I cared about got hurt, but I swear to you now, I will not let that happen to you. Not to any of you. I promise you that; I swear it on my life. I won’t let anything bad happen to you.”

“Is that what you told them?” Yaz asks, jerking her head towards the pictures, and after a moment’s hesitation, the Doctor nods sadly, her eyes wide and guilt-laden.

“So, how can you say it’s different this time?” Yaz wonders aloud, her tone accusatory. “You can’t.”

“Yaz…”

Yaz turns on her heel and strides from the room without looking back, wishing fervently she had never entered the innocuous-seeming room, and never asked the fateful question. She’d known, hadn’t she? She’d known that travelling with the Doctor would be dangerous. But it’s one thing to know it hypothetically, and quite another to be faced with the uncomfortable reminders of it in the faces of the Doctor’s previous friends and companions; quite another to be told of their fates with such unflinching honesty.

“Yaz!” the Doctor calls, seizing her by the hand and pulling her around to face her. “Yaz, tell me honestly that you didn’t know what you were getting in for.”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“So, what? Are you going to leave? Walk away? Because if you are, I can’t blame you. I won’t stop you. But know that you will be missed, and you will be thought about; know that the TARDIS is a happier place for every moment that you and the fam spend in it, and just…”

“I’m not leaving,” Yaz tells her flatly. “How could I? How could I walk away from this?”

“I…”

“I just need some time to get using to the idea of what happened to them,” Yaz assures her. “And to make sure that it doesn’t happen to any of us.”

“It won’t.”

“You can’t promise that!”

“I can try,” the Doctor says fiercely. “And I swear to you, I will try for as long as there’s breath in my body.”


End file.
